


Anonymous

by Selena



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, Circle of Voltaire RPF
Genre: Academia, Gen, I'm Sorry William Shakespeare, Metafiction, Parody
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:15:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28170771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selena/pseuds/Selena
Summary: Who really wrote the works of Voltaire? In a highly controversial panel, three major candidates emerge.
Relationships: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great/Voltaire (Writer), Voltaire (Writer) & Other(s), Émilie du Châtelet/Voltaire (Writer)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 14
Collections: Yuletide Madness 2020





	Anonymous

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raspberryhunter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raspberryhunter/gifts).



> **Disclaimer** : No Anti-Stratfordians were harmed in the production of this silliness, which is solely written to amuse its recipient. Check out the footnote for the measly historical background.

_Protocol of a recent debate panel_ : 

**Moderator:** Welcome to our panel on the Voltaire Authorship Question. Dr. Jambon, you’re a Richelais. Can you explain to our audience what this means?

**Jambon:** It means my position in the Voltaire authorship controversy is that of support of the theory that none other than Armand du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu is the true author we know as „Voltaire“, not François-Marie Arouet, the man who in his lifetime claimed to have invented the Voltaire pseudonym and to have written his works.

**Moderator: …** Richelieu the Cardinal from _The Three Musketeers_? Didn’t he live in another era? Another century, in fact? 

**Jambon:** No, his great-grandnephew, who was in fact a schoolmate of Arouet’s; they both attended the grammar school Louis Le Grand. It is my firm belief that during this time, young Armand realised that he wouldn’t be able to have a future in writing as more as a dilettante if he would publish under his real name. His work would be seen as an aristocratic pastime. Therefore, he decided to pay his schoolmate, the son of a notary who was quick witted enough to be an entertaining conversationalist, to be his life long front man. Ever since George Sand first pitched the idea in one of her novellas, more and more scholars have opened their eyes to the facts, and the facts are these: no mere notary’s son would have had the courage to publish the kind of criticism of church and state Voltaire did. And writing satiric pamphlets about a monarch the way Voltaire did after his breakup with Frederick the Great? Unthinkable for a bourgois upstart. This was seventy years before the French Revolution, after all. But for an aristocrat like Richelieu who’d taken the safety measure of a pseudonym, it was far more likely. Moreover, if Arouet and Voltaire weren’t the same person, it explains why repeatedly people enamored by Voltaire’s writings felt let down when they met him in person, notably Frederick the Great who ended up loathing the man while continueing to worship the author. Even Arouet’s painful death is explained. Previously, it was assumed his old friend Richelieu sent him opium during the last week of his life in order to lessen the pain, but inadvertently the opium ended up making Arouet’s state even more painful. But if you consider Arouet had just been celebrated all over Paris upon his return there, which had to gall Richelieu who knew who little he deserved it, a deliberate action is far more likely. 

**Dr. Kreisler:** Excuse me, but all of this is nonsensical conjecture. Richelieu was far too busy fucking everyone in sight to be responsible for such a gigantic oeuvre. I mean, Richelieu ended up being portrayed as Valmont in _Les Liasons Dangerouses_ by Chloderos de Laclos. When was he supposed to have had the time, let alone the discipline, to author all those books? 

**Moderator:** Dr. Kreisler , you are an Emilian. Do tell us about your own position in the Voltaire authorship controversy. 

**Kreisler:** Well, to me, the true author hiding behind the alias of „Voltaire“ is self evident, and of course it’s not a man. It is Émilie du Châtelet, philosopher, scientist and, if we accept she was also „Voltaire“, poet. Émilie knew that as a woman, she’d never be taken seriously. Look what happened when she did publish under her own name! So she first established a safe male alias. Later, when the relationship with Arouet grew more tense, she attempted a second career under her own name, but the recognition wasn’t what she’d hoped for, so she eventually decided to fake her own death, giving the „Émilie du Châtelet“ identity a good finale with her great Newton translation into French which we still use, and thereafter concentrate on the „Voltaire“ side of her publishing activity.

**Moderator:** Faked her own death? 

**Kreisler:** Clearly. Just look at it objectively. She gives birth, all is fine, everyone is relieved, and then a few days later she’s suddenly dead after one bad night? No way. That whole pregnancy was faked while Émilie prepared her next steps. Now, evidently the true reason why she’d been upset the two or three times Arouet visited Frederick in Prussia wasn’t because of jealousy, that’s just a sexist assumption, but because she was afraid Frederick would uncover the truth. But after Arouet had become impossible to live with because he was that eager for Frederick fanboying him all the time in Prussia, Émilie decided to teach him a lesson and let him go while she escaped to a new identity in Switzerland. The thing with Frederick became the predictable disaster it was, and a chastened Arouet ended up in Switzerland as well, content to remain Émilie’s front man for the rest of their lives. 

**Moderator:** Dr. Jambon, your rebuttal? 

**Jambon:** First of all, Émilie du Châtelet was still a child when „Voltaire“ started to publish. Is she supposed to have written _Oedipus_ as a school girl?

**Kreisler:** You bet. She was a _Wunderkind_ , a girl wonder. 

**Jambon:** Even if she was, how did she persuade Arouet to become her front man while still of a single digit age, huh? I hope you’re not suggesting pedophilia. 

**Kreisler:** Not at all. Her father, who recognized his daughter’s intelligence and talent but also wanted to protect her and ensure she’d have a future entailing a good aristocratic marriage was the one who made the original contact and found young Arouet! This explains why in some biographical accounts, „Voltaire“ and Émilie don’t meet until she’s married with two children and two love affairs past her and in some he’s met her as a young poet when visiting her father’s salon. Clearly _some_ smidgeon of truth made it out. Presumably they had corresponded for years so he’d know how to talk about her work which was published under their pseudonym, and then after his return from England they met in person and unexpectedly hit it off. Hence the love affair, which also made things far easier for her for some years until he became, see above, impossible to live with. 

**Jambon:** But what about the time when „Voltaire“ and Émilie wrote different and competing papers on heat which they both sent to the French Academy for consideration? Why would she compete against herself?

**Kreisler:** Do you really have to ask, in the age of the sockpuppett? Which, and I shouldn’t have to remind you, „Voltaire“ was a master of centuries before it became fashionable. Even old fashioned Arouetians would admit as much; „he“ loved stirring controversy by publishing under different aliases. 

**Jambon:** Granted. But you’re still asking us to believe that Émilie du Châtelet’s husband the Marquis du Châtelet and her other lover, Saint-Lambert, played along in the deception of her death. And what about Arouet’s niece, Madame Denis, who joined him near the end of his three German years and led his household for his remaining life? As we now know, she was also his mistress from the late 1740s onwards. Everyone describes her as a very bossy woman, while words like „imperious“ are frequently used for Émilie du Châtelet. Do you really think the two would have lived together in Switzerland along with Arouet to maintain the „Voltaire“ deception while Émilie continued to write the works? 

**Kreisler:** I never said Émilie stayed in Switzerland, just that Arouet never again struck out on his own as opposed to doing what she told him once they had reunited post Prussia. They probably went back to remaining in contact via correspondance again. And I think it’s self evident where she went next. 

**Jambon:** No, it’s not. 

**Kreisler:** Russia, of course. Why do you think „Voltaire“ started his correspondance with Catherine the Great? All those Voltairian letters praising Catherine were Émilie singing for her supper, so to speak. 

**Dr. Vertroute:** Excuse me, but I’ve remained silent long enough. When I was invited to this panel, I was led to believe we’d all be able to represent our views equally, not that heteronormativity and xenophobia would triumph again. 

**Kreisler and Jambon:** Say what? 

**Moderator:** I apologize. Dr. Vertroute, explain to us the Frederician position. 

**Vertroute:** With all due respect to my esteemed colleagues, but I find their arguments flawed and mistaken. Not regarding Arouet – I entirely agree someone like François-Marie Arouet could never have written Voltaire’s works, with their depth, wit, knowledge of human suffering and boldness of spirit. Arouet the life long hypochondriac who was afraid of a chill able to challenge the authorities of his age so relentlessly? Definitely not. But we must not glorify our objects of study, and there is also a malice in some of the pamphlets which strikes me as alien to what we know of Émilie du Châtelet… 

**Kreisler** : *mutters*: Madame de Graffigny would disagree. 

**Vertroute:** …while Richelieu was way too conventionally religious to have written all those attacks on the church. No, but there is one reason who clearly qualifies as the true author behind the alias of „Voltaire“, and he was identified by none other Sigmund Freud, who uncovered the way this man’s childhood trauma, unfufilled oedipal longings and self-castrating tendencies all were compensated by the sublime creation of „Voltaire“. „Voltaire“ became not only the artist Frederick wasn’t allowed to be in his primary identity, but also an ersatz father figure and idealized, longed for object of homosexual desire at the same time. A classic case!

**Jambon:** I hate to repeat myself, but you Fredericians have the same problem the Emilians do, only more so. Not only was your guy still a child when Voltaire started to publish, but he was living in another country. And _his_ father definitely wasn’t the type to arrange for a front man. What with hating and resenting young Frederick’s love of French and French literature. 

**Vertroute:** Which is why his father didn’t do it, his tutor, Jacques Duhan de Jandun did. 

**Kreisler:** I don’t think Emilians and Fredericans are comparable at all. The entire correspondance between Émilie and „Voltaire“ is missing, despite their contemporaries swearing it felt not just volumes but shelves, and its very absence is a strong argument for it being destroyed deliberately, to hide the authorship truth. On the other hand, the Frederick/Voltaire correspondence exists almost entirely, also fills volumes, and is written in two different handwritings and styles. Not to mention that Frederick did publish under his own name, and his poetry was notoriously mediocre. Émilie’s publications under her own name, by contrast, are all inspired. 

**Vertroute:** Which is an argument against her needing a front man. If you’d read Freud’s „The Use of Psychoanalysis in Literature“, Dr. Kreisler, you’d know that he showed how all the trauma of Frederick’s childhood necessitated a life long complicated roleplay, in wich he on the one hand fed his need for praise by writing two sides of a correspondance whose early years are entirely devoted to declaring each other’s genius, and on the other to express his ever growing self loathing by all the mutual critique and bickering in the later years. Arouet showing up in Prussia was of course the turning point which necessitated a readjustment of the roleplay, as it forced Frederick to admit how far from his idealized self he’d moved. 

**Kreisler:** But….

**Vertroute:** To say nothing of the fact that there is no other explanation for Frederick’s resuming the correspondance with Voltaire after their dramatic breakup and mutual disparagment in the eyes of the world. Do we really believe a paranoid despot like Frederick would have continued to open up in writing to a man he simultanously kept railing against as the worst of the worst if that man wasn’t, literally, himself? He certainly wouldn’t have done so towards someone like the Duc de Richelieu who, need I remind you, was in fact one of the generals leading armies against him in the Seven-Years-War. And he was far too much a misogynist to do so towards a woman he wasn’t related to. 

**Jambon:** But…

**Moderator:** Excuse me, we’re running out of time. I think you three have given us a good idea of Voltaire Authorship Controversy’s wide spectrum of opinion and theories. Any final words on the recent movie trying to combine all three theories by making Richelieu the author of Voltaire’s youthful verses, Émilie the author of his middle period and Frederick the writer of his late work as well as adding some fictional spice by postulating Émilie was in fact secretly the incest baby of the Duc D’Orleans and his daughter? 

**Kreisler:** That movie should have had a different script. The Ninja interlude in the scene when Émilie and Arouet are fleeing the country was way too much. 

**Jambon:** I liked Orlando Bloom as Richelieu. 

**Vertroute:** Since I’m currently sueing Roland Emmerich for unauthorized quotes from my study, I can’t comment. 

**Author's Note:**

>  **Author's footnote** : While there is no Voltaire authorship controversy, Émilie du Châtelet certainly was a brilliant scientist and writer in her own right (as well as Voltaire's partner of two decades), Richelieu the gread grandnephew of the more famous Cardinal was his schoolmate and life long friend (and supposedly one of the inspirations for Valmont in _Les Liasons Dangereuses_ ), and the ups and downs of the Voltaire/Frederick the Great relationship are their own story, novel and epic. 
> 
> If you've been spared the Shakespeare authorship controversy and the positions which this bit of fluff is spoofing, consider yourself lucky.


End file.
